Beauty Is In The Eye of The Beholder of The Camera

Totally got jacked up taking a picture of this by a not so nice person, at the not so Louvre, who demanded this or that and wanted to walk me to the door.  I asked if every person with an iPhone gets kicked out, too … Apparently, I’m a digital terrorist but someone with and iPhone posting an image to Facebook is OK, I guess.  Viva la arts!

Just like the Lee County evidence locker, the gun show at the Lee Civic Center and United States border patrol in New Mexico, there was no sign that read “no photographs” but plenty of people with the nickers in a bunch when the shutter started clicking. I am so in a database already.

Enjoy The Day However You Celebrate

For years we had a family inside joke “save the cheerleader, save the world”. It’s a line from the cancelled sci-fi TV show, Heroes. Since we had a diehard cheerleader in the family it was the perfect smart alec thing to say every time there was a predicament to help her though … I’m not saying she was high maintenance or anything.

Thankfully, we did save her from the many traumas and tragedies of growing up and I now believe we did so for the sole purpose of passing onto her the tradition of cooking Thanksgiving dinner. There is a recessive gene in our family that, fortunately, causes the cooking of Thanksgiving dinner skip every other generation.

My mother, rest her soul, would have probably gotten a kick out of how I fabricated a tale great enough that the cheerleader believed I was genetically unable to prepare Thanksgiving dinner. I stopped just short of her trying to organize a telethon.

For what it’s worth for anyone wondering how it went last year, well, it was all fun and games until we realized we bought a turkey without a popper upper thing in the breast. Since I’m a grazer and not a carnivore, there was no expert on staff to solve that dilemma so we did the next best thing and Googled how to tell when a turkey is done. (See guys, there’s more to the web than just porn.)

I’m sure that both your mother and mine probably cooked a thousand and two turkeys without a popper upper before Butterball revolutionized the basic American turkey. The only thing foreign that came out of the turkeys that I ate growing up was buckshot. Sidebar: It could not have been safe for children to eat that much lead every day.

So the kid decided to tackle the holiday for the second time, invite everyone over via text message and add the declaration, “Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday!” Later that day I stalked onto Facebook to check up on the brood to see what sorts of things they’ve been up to.

Posted on the cheerleader’s Facebook wall by her roommate/cheerleader Taylor is this fascinating quote: “You know your room mate is an amazing chef when you are awakened by the smoke detector and she has to run into your room to learn how to shut them off. Oh and you stunt in the hallway to reach the detector!”

If you’re not up on the whole cheerleading stunt thingy, best case scenario with these two means that someone was standing on someone else’s shoulders to reach the smoke detectors. That’s talent and ingenuity in action, right there.

Ladies and gentlemen, I hope your Thanksgiving is going to be hilarious as ours is probably going to be. If it’s not I hope you find at least one thing to smile about and to be grateful for. I’m grateful for my recessive holiday cooking gene and my “emotional allergy” to beets, lima beans and Swiss chard.

She believed that line, too, and they’re not on the menu just so I don’t have a severe reaction.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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Real Life in Bonita Springs is a project by Chris Griffith dedicated to writing useful blog posts for consumers about the Bonita Springs, Florida area.  Find out what it is really like to live in Bonita Springs, Florida by reading about our fair city. You’ll get the latest in local real estate information, Bonita Springs real estate market reports and a little bit of humor.  If you have topic ideas, feel free to request a story about the idea, after all, this site is just for you.

You can subscribe to a weekly email newsletter by visiting www.LifeInBonitaSprings.com and entering your email in the subscription area on the center pane of the web page or by adding us to your reader by subscribing to this blog. Oh, and if you’re reading this content anywhere else but www.LifeInBonitaSprings.com or Naples Daily News it is probably stolen.

Mushroom Farming in Bonita Springs Florida

For the record, I’d replaced this real estate sign about two months prior … I just forgot to throw it out. Today, when I saw it growing mushrooms on it, I realized it was two months late for trash collection.  Wondering if I can grow Portobello’s or Morels down here …

Sunscreen Would No Longer Be Necessary

Get Your Cookies Before It’s Too Late

So, I saw someone mention buying their Girl Scout Cookies online and thought that I should get some. After a shout out on Facebook a fellow real estate agent I know said, “My daughter is a girl scout, what would you like to order?” 

Continuing on, I placed my order via Facebook message and said, “Should I mail a check to you or drop it off at your office?”  She replied, “Do you have a pre-approval for financing or proof of funds for said cookies?”  You gotta love that!

If you’re looking for Girl Scout Cookies this year and don’t know a Girl Scout, just email me and I’ll hook you up with a Girl Scout contact but you have to order before January 23, 2011. 

I don’t think she was serious about the proof of funds.

Photo courtesy of Library of Virginia

Phone Books Cluttering Up a Home Near You

Ever hear that old wives tale; if you touch a frog, you’ll get warts? What do you have to touch to get a half dozen unsolicited phone books dumped on at your front door every year.

You may not know this but phone books are the warts of vacant real estate. They’re probably considered the warts of occupied real estate, depending upon the occupant’s point of view.

As a real estate agent, I’ve stood at a lot of front doors and I’ve seen a lot of lonely phone books piled up by welcome mats. What amazes me is seeing years of phone books piled by the front door in some of the empty homes.

The phone book delivery person is, no doubt, an independent contractor paid to sprinkle them across town. I’m thinking that there must be a paycheck penalty for applying deductive reasoning or common sense to skip a home if nobody has retrieved the last five additions.

My own personal record for discovering a phone book stock pile at a vacant house was 11. There were about five or six outside which was impressive. There was another stack inside the door. Someone kept tossing them close to the front door of the foreclosed home and I guess real estate agents kept putting them inside when they were showing the place.

Even if there had been someone living there I wonder if they could opt out of phone book delivery if they even wanted to.

When I came home last week and found a fossil in a plastic bag on my front porch I actually Googled to see how to suspend the delivery.

The site where I ended up was www.YellowPagesGoesGreen.org. I filled out a few of the opt-out forms for “phone book companies” they believe are delivered to my area. Who knows, it may work. Either that or I actually just filled out my detailed contact information and got myself on more phone book lists.

Between the internet and smart phones, a huge chunk of the American public no longer really has a need for a phone book. That phone book, chock full of important contact information you and I are supposed to not be able to live without isn’t exactly a necessity.

Approximately 1.2 billion pounds of phone books are thrown out every year. So much energy and resources are being wasted for no other reason than to make highly unattractive paper front porch ornaments plus it leaves a big, fat carbon footprint.

I’m morally conflicted but at my house that pile of pulp gets the express route from point A to point B which stands for “bin”, as in my recycle bin. The book, regardless of its color can’t help but lose relevancy when a consumer can search online, find what they’re searching for and get consumer reviews and endorsements.

Now, I realize there are a few people who actually do use the phone book. From what I learned form an impromptu poll I took online, the biggest users are web developers who are looking for businesses behind the times who obviously have money to spend on getting a website built and people who are too short to reach the steering wheel in their car.

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Real Life in Bonita Springs is a project by Chris Griffith dedicated to writing useful blog posts for consumers about the Bonita Springs, Florida area.  Find out what it is really like to live in Bonita Springs, Florida by reading about our fair city. You’ll get the latest in local real estate information, Bonita Springs real estate market reports and a little bit of humor.  If you have topic ideas, feel free to request a story about the idea, after all, this site is just for you.

You can subscribe to a weekly email newsletter by visiting www.LifeInBonitaSprings.com and entering your email in the subscription area on the center pane of the web page or by adding us to your reader by subscribing to this blog. Oh, and if you’re reading this content anywhere else but www.LifeInBonitaSprings.com or Naples Daily News it is probably stolen.

Happy Thanksgiving Southwest Florida

A few weeks ago my daughter came to me with the realization that we needed to formulate a plan for Thanksgiving dinner. My mother had organized and cooked Thanksgiving the last few years. She passed away at the end of February and it hadn’t occurred to me that we were left Thanksgiving dinnerless.

Thanksgiving has always been an unusual holiday in our family mostly because the very child that suddenly wanted to make plans had been the queen bee ring leader for years who kept us from Thanksgiving at home.

If there’s a parent out there with a tween or younger cheerleader they know exactly what I’m talking about. They’re probably not reading this because they’re in Orlando, the happiest place on earth, Florida right now pretending they’re having fun watching thousands of cheerleaders wearing too much mascara and cheap perfume perform their little hearts out. That performance is usually followed by act two which is crying themselves to sleep on the way home.

Our family spent about a decade of “good times” in Orlando at the cheer-fest shindig before we were able to retire to a few years of normal Thanksgiving life with all the fixin’s at Grandma’s house.

Suffice it to say, I’m an older and wiser since the nest emptied out so when the opportunity came for me to cook Thanksgiving dinner I explained to my darling daughter that this would be the perfect opportunity for this tradition to skip every other generation. I explained further that since she is now a first time home owner it would be the perfect housewarming, too.

For the record, I actually congratulated myself for slipping out of that one so masterfully.

She tried wiggling out of it, too; not enough plates, not enough room at the table, blah blah blah. Without missing a beat there were volunteers bringing plastic ware and Chinette who agreed that sitting on the sofa without a table was perfectly fine.

What goes around comes around. I didn’t toss her under the bus just for me; I did it for the boys. Her brothers, one of which is her twin have suffered through way too many cheering competitions and this is their just reward. The entertainment value of assigning turkey day to someone whose only culinary accomplishment has been a grilled American cheese sandwich makes that turkey literally worth its weigh in gold.

She has no clue but I’ve helped her avert the first tragedy, buying the bird and thawing it out before Thursday. As of Wednesday it hadn’t occurred to her and when it does I’m not letting on right away that I have a thawed turkey in my fridge.

Needless to say, we are prepared for total calamity in the kitchen but we know that if it gets that bad, we can always fall back on her grilled cheese sandwich as the back up plan. Lord knows we’ve eaten much worse on Thanksgiving Day before Grandma saved us.

The one thing we learned spending all of those Thanksgivings in central Florida is that when we were together we always had fun. We had fun making her ride roller coasters with curlers in her hair. We had fun eating at the world’s worst diners while giving thanks.

If you’re fortunate enough to not be in Orlando, Florida shaking your spirit fingers to pop song mash-ups hopefully you’re making the most out of what ever company you’re keeping or whatever cuisine you’re enjoying, even if it’s just a grilled cheese sandwich.

Happy Thanksgiving.

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Real Life in Bonita Springs is a project by Chris Griffith dedicated to writing useful blog posts for consumers about the Bonita Springs, Florida area.  Find out what it is really like to live in Bonita Springs, Florida by reading about our fair city. You’ll get the latest in local real estate information, Bonita Springs real estate market reports and a little bit of humor.  If you have topic ideas, feel free to request a story about the idea, after all, this site is just for you.

You can subscribe to a weekly email newsletter by visiting www.LifeInBonitaSprings.com and entering your email in the subscription area on the center pane of the web page or by adding us to your reader by subscribing to this blog. Oh, and if you’re reading this content anywhere else but www.LifeInBonitaSprings.com or Naples Daily News it is probably stolen.

Capturing The Opening Blossom

There’s a light on my mailbox post that has been burned out for some time.  Since I live in a home owner association all of the mailboxes are the same and a local resident maintains the light situation if one burns out.  Well, there’s a passiflora that has engulfed my mailbox rendering it virtually impossible to change the light.

My weekend mission was to get together a couple of helping hands to suspend the plant to be able to open the light box and change the bulb.  The plant could have actually been whacked back and it would have grown up again but I have fruit on my plant.  Honest to goodness, passion fruit. 

It’s been a crappy winter and they might not even turn into anything useful or even edible but I thought I’d at least try. 

As luck would have it what I thought was a withered blossom from yesterday was actually about to open.  The flowers open really fast in the sun and since it was on the north side it was slower than usual.  I took several pictures so you could watch it open.  The last two pictures have a honey bee on it.  Enjoy!

Overheard: Dang, Grandma Was HOT!

First of all, I know I’ve been away for a while. I’ve never, in years of blogging, not written for this long.  Not this long for my blog and not this much time off from the paper.  My plate has been full and well, I’m just starting to get my courage steam back.

Many of my friends, clients and contemporaries that have followed the up and down roller coaster of cancer and illness with my mom.  I’ve been to her northern home three times in three months because of some very serious events.  She always rallies and true to form, even at Christmas, after receiving last rites, she rallied days later and requested a pepperoni pizza from Yala’s in Lorain, Ohio.

She eventually got well enough to make it back to Bonita Springs to see her Florida grand children and her home with the new kitchen ceiling.  The house had one of those dreadful dome ceilings from the 80’s.  It was brought back to life with halogen lights and crown molding.  Donna’s visit was brief, just several days. 

She flew home on a Thursday and had passed away by Saturday night.  Cancer is a mean bitch, almost as mean as the cure.  It took almost four years for the two of them to gang up on her and win.

You can read more about her here: Donna Thomas Fashing Filbert [Gabor] While she would have publicly given me the evil eye for that, she would have privately thought that was funny, too. Lighten up.

At any rate, I’m going to try to start doing my jobs again.  Job number one, boring you with real estate info and Bonita Springs ambassadorial things. Job number two, pishing people off that read the paper mere moments before it hits the bottom of the bird cage.  I sure hope I think of something to write by Tuesday.

I was going announce “I’m back” but I just hear Jack Nicholson’s voice from “The Shining” so I’ll just say see you tomorrow.

See you tomorrow.